The Dumbing Down Of American Youth

The indisputable decline of our once great country, America, began in the early 1960's under the administration of that colossal buffoon Lyndon Baines Johnson and his liberal followers on the far left. Johnson's Great Society was responsible for many of the ills that plague America today but, arguably, the most important of his misstep's were the policies that resulted in the dumbing down of America young people. From 1963 to 1980 the national mean SAT scores for white pre-college students dropped almost half a standard deviation on the verbal portion of the test and about a third on the math side of the test. This represented a 25 point drop in the math SAT scores and a whopping 45 point drop in the verbal scores. By the way, like it or not, the SAT test is one of the more reliable indications of cognitive ability ever designed by the sociologists that study the intellectual capacity of America's teenagers. Thus, this remarkable fall in SAT scores represented a significant decrease in the mean IQ of young people in America during the 60's and 70's. The social engineers in the Johnson administration, and most of the educators of the day, attributed this decline in the national cognitive ability of our youth to the fact that, as time went on in the 60's and 70's, more and more students from disadvantaged homes were taking the test. Thus, because cognitive ability is largely dependent on environmental factors, they wrongly argued, the mean SAT scores were bound to fall as educational opportunities were expanded to include an ever increasing number of children who were raised in poverty or near poverty in environments that were not conducive to the development of normal intellectual ability. Alas, most liberals, including their political leaders, and, most importantly, the liberal press and TV personalities on the left, still believe this erroneous explanation for the nation's intellectual decline today, 50 plus years after Lyndon Johnson picked up his beagle dogs by the ears because, he assured us, they liked it! However, most of the sociologists and psychologists who spend their lives studying the effects of all the factors that influence the intellectual development of the human brain, do not agree with Johnson's assertion that dogs like to be picked up by their ears, or this commonly held explanation for the falling SAT scores during the 60's and 70's. Rather, the vast majority of social scientists have concluded that the primary thrust of education, which prior to the Johnson administration had been concentrated on the education of the nation's brightest students, shifted 180 degrees in the early 1960's, when, In an effort to expand educational opportunities to all American children, irrespective of race or the socioeconomic status, educators supported by liberal politicians, initiated educational reforms that favored students with average and below average cognitive ability at the expense of those with very high intelligence. This shift, the experts tell us, was responsible for the declining SAT scores from 1960 to 1980. In short, the socialists effort to educate America's underclass had the effect of dumbing down the rest of the population. The effect of these shifts in educational policies, and most importantly where the educational dollars were spent, by the social engineers in the Johnson administration was to make it easier for students with average or below average intelligence to succeed in grade school and high school. The ultimate goal was to have as many of these under achievers as possible go to college whether they were college material or not. These unwise shifts in educational policies, of course, made it easier for gifted students to succeed in high school without really even trying. Only those who had their, and their parents, heart set on going to the elite ivy league schools and Stanford made a maximal effort to do as well as they possible could in high school. Unfortunately, the numbers of these over-achievers were too small to make a significant difference in the falling SAT scores of average students who took the test. In summary, scholars studying this phenomenon, the dumbing down of American students, have concluded that the decreasing demand for excellence in our schools in general and the shift in emphasis in educational goals from the gifted student to the mundane is largely responsible for the observed fall in intellectual capacity of today's student population as compared to the students of past generations. It is commonly said that the SAT was democatized in the 1960's and 1970's. If so, the results have been nothing short of disastrous for American life and it's culture as shown by the alarming increase in the rate of incarceration, the rate of single parent families, the outrageous increase in illegitimacy, and the staggering unemployment rate, to name only a few of the nation's most egregious social problems. If you are interested in pursuing this subject further, I suggest you invest $20.00 in Herrnstein and Murray's masterpiece- The Bell Curve. I assure you , it will be the best $20.00 you have ever invested in your education! Yes Mable, it is never too late to learn something useful! This book was a New York Times best seller for years despite the controversial nature of its content. For those of you who refuse to accept the fact that there has been a conscious effort by educators to dumb down the education our students are receiving from institutions of public learning, consider this. Since the 1960's the vocabulary in text books has been deliberately simplified in an effort to pander to IQ challenged students. This dumbing down of textbooks came under the guise of "readability" formulas devised by the school boards who buy the textbooks our elementary and high school students read. Thomas Sowell gave a good example of this effort to dumb down American textbooks. In this glaring example of stupidity on the part of one school board charged with the education of children in their district, the words spectacle and admired were deleted from a text book because they were deemed to be to difficult for high school students. As Sowell points out, "in the old days, words like species, dialogue, health, and benighted were intended for 8-year olds." Now days, they are not even expected to know what a spectacle is or what it means to admire someone or something. Yes, education has fallen a long way in this country and the national IQ has tumbled right along with it! Unfortunately, the end of this intellectual train wreck is nowhere in sight.